(2/3) “I’d also been engaged recently. We broke it off in January. I was trying to make some changes in my life. I stopped wearing make-up for a few months to see what sort of things I’d notice if I stopped looking in the mirror so much. I made a deal with myself that I wasn’t going to post any selfies for a while. I was only going to photograph things that weren’t me. I started posting photos of nature, art, and my teacup collection. That began to attract other people into my life who were interested in those things. One night Chris sent me a message. It was a photo of a bridge he’d just taken. We went back and forth for a couple weeks, then decided to meet. A few months earlier, I probably would have never agreed to meet. But I was at a point in my life where I was trying to be open to new things. I told him my only rule was that he couldn’t murder me.”
“And my only rule was that she had to wear her cat glasses.”  

I often follow the popular photo blog called, Humans of New York, which displays photography from Brandon Stanton. Recently I had noticed this particular blog post and thought of our CS400ba course. Technology has truly entered so many aspects of the personal and work lives. Online dating is a new phenomenon, some popular smart phone applications and dating websites include Tinder, Grinder and Plenty of Fish. However, as displayed in this blog post by Stanton, digital technologies not originally created for dating purposes has led to being used for that anyways.

As discussed throughout this semester, we have learned much about how social formations are materially constituted as articulations of technologies of collaboration and coordination. Do you feel that online dating apps and websites allow for this to occur and thus create new cultural imaginaries of social belonging? With this in mind, how do you feel about online dating? Does it make dating too easy? Tedious? Fun? Revolutionary? Or does this new form of dating seem to be taken too far by the increase of technology and being connected via the internet in our globalized world today?

 

Anonymous in Society

Hey Friends

My presentation featured the infamous hacktivist group Anonymous as written about by Gabriella Coleman in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy.

I spoke about their transition from a group of hackers and trolls on 4chan (Habbo Hotel) to global pranksters and political activists. I think most of us would agree that they are subversively important. However, are they justified to do what they do? I mean, who is to say that they don't label the students of WLU as the next threat they must go after (they wont, but for the sake of discussion). This group follows no laws and has no overlaying philosophy. Who is to say that their actions are correct or just when they do not abide by the same rules they hold others accountable to.

HackPack: Freelance Journalism

The article “The Rise of the Projective City” by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello explains how freelancing has become more popular due to a shift from permanent positions to project-based work. The article below describes the creation of HackPack, a platform that connects freelancers worldwide to the news bureaus that need them. This allows media outlets to maintain an international presence and publish independent original stories, while freelance journalists can gain an outlet for their work that pays a fair wage. It also allows these journalists to publish stories that might otherwise be rejected by local news organizations where press freedom is low.

Do you think that platforms like HackPack will improve the way international news is covered, making it more authentic and accurate? Do you think this sort of system will allow for more perspectives, more voices to be heard worldwide? What are some potential issues with freelance journalism in general?

https://ijnet.org/en/blog/hackpack-connects-freelancers-fixers-and-editors-publish-independent-media-coverage

The Coca-Cola Company Presents: the True Story of Modern Day Santa!

Have you ever goggled who invented Santa? If you have, you may have been surprised by the top hit.

The Coca-Cola Company presents: the true story of modern day Santa!

Haddon Sundbloom, a designer for Coca-Cola in the 1930’s, is credited with creating the most iconic representation of modern day Santa Claus. His version was based on a Sundbloom’s Santa is what Fuchs would consider “Cultural Work”. I.e. work that is done in relation to others, involving the production and reproduction of meaning.

The concept of ownership in a capitalist structure has been a theme explored at great length through this course. As we have discussed, when you are credited with creating an intellectual or physical good you have the right to be compensated accordingly.  In this case, neither Coca-Cola nor Sundbloom have been credited any royalties for the billions of retail dollars monetized in commoditized Santa goods. Why would Coca-Cola, an extremely capitalistic corporation, not demand royalties on products that use the image of Santa they claimed to have created? It appears that since there were similar images of “Santa” that existed during the 30’s, Sundbloom’s representation of Santa could not be credited as his own. 

Do you think this example convolutes the idea of physical ownership & intellectual ownership in a capitalist superstructure?

                                                                                                            

From Self-Coding Super Stars on MySpace to Passive Lurkers on Facebook

In the reading Mobile Web 2.0, Goggin explores the evolution of the mobile web and the social and cultural implications it has had on society.

Since the worldwide adaption of the Internet in the 80’, Internet uses ahve undergone several radical changes. For many of us 90’s kids, our first experiences on the web were on social media platforms such as MSN and MySpace. Both of these mediums necessitated a highly engaged user experience. On MySpace, users had the ability for full-scale personalization as they could code in backgrounds, buttons, and icons to build their profile pages. While, the whole premise of MSN was active real-time engagement with other users.

Eventually, we moved away from these veteran platforms to embrace new forms of social media such as twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Today, social media users on these platforms are taking a more observatory role. Recently, Ad Week posted an article, which discussed how in Q3 only 34% of Facebook users shared something on Facebook. Even with Facebook’s attempts to stimulate their audience probing them to share movements from “5 years ago”, users are not biting.

This is extremely detrimental to Facebook’s business model, as it capitalizes on all of the un-paid content their billions of users produce daily. If users stop producing content, our newsfeeds will become nothing more than cluttered as spaces. So, why have people stopped posting content on Facebook? I argue that today, most of Facebook’s users have vested years establishing their presence on this platform, and so the need to affirm one’s self or lifestyle simply may not be as tenacious.

We've gone from self-coding super stars on MySpace to inactive lurkers on Facebook within a decade. Could passivity be the future of mobile web 3.0? 

Internet.org, scaling the Internet, or scaling Facebook?

In the reading What is Cognitive Capitalism?, Boutang explores how both network size and market size affect a business’ ability to achieve capital gain (Boutang, 65).

An interesting example of how both network and market size intersect in a capitalist structure is the how restricted Internet access around the world poses a scalability issue for Facebook. In 2015, Facebook reported that there are over 1 billion people in the world who use Facebook. Since 3 billion people in the world have access to Internet, this means that 1/3 people who can use Facebook are active users.

Mark Zuckerberg realizes that his ability to grow Facebook is naturally capped by market size rather than an inability to propagate the existing network. Zuckerberg’s acknowledgement of this ecological hindrance has inspired the new initiative campaign called Internet.org. Internet.org’s mission is to bring Internet to areas of the world that do not have access today.

Internet.org does not provide free internet to all users. However, it does provide free Facebook access to users in affected areas. Zuckerberg agues that Facebook will provide these individuals with international news and medical information, which they would not otherwise have access to. While this may appear charitable on the surface, this initiative is exploitative as it fulfills Zuckerberg’s own capitalistic interest. If Internet access becomes more widespread, than the Facebook network has the ability to continue growing in an exponential fashion. Do you think that the internet.org imitative is morally flawed? 

This example also relates to Neff’s idea of “wealthy owners”. Zuckerbeg is committed to helping Facebook scale globally, so he can continue to establish his company. Zuckerberg has a personally vested interest in Facebook’s growth as it is correlated with his capital gain.  

Genius.it

I'm sure everyone is familiar with RapGenius, but if not, it's a neat startup that provided users with lyrics and lyric meanings to many hip-hop/rap songs by searching their database and viewing the annotations provided by industry professionals or often the artists themselves.

RapGenius has since dropped "Rap" from its handle and users can now find annotations to multiple different genres of music.  But Genius is taking it a step further. As this article by Vice Motherboard outlines, Genius is planning to annotate the web, and it is employing you as it's annotator.

A quote from the creator:

“The internet, with this product, is your canvas for creating whatever your mark is on the layer of annotation that is going to be on every document and on every webpage,” Lehman said. “You can go a very exegetical route, you can try to explain what’s going on, you can just get a little more creative or imagistic.”

By adding "genius.it" before any URL, you will be able to access the annotated version of any webpage (although I tried it and couldn't get it to work, so I'm guessing it hasn't launched yet or is still in beta mode).

I think this is the perfect example of "prosumer" work, because users are able to use the platform in ways of both consumption and production of annotations.

Do you think it's right that the founders of Genius are so blatantly putting it's users to work to expand the coverage of the platform to the entire internet? Is this a fair exchange of production and consumption?



in case embedded link doesn't work: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/post-rap-genius-shows-how-to-annotate-anything-on-the-web